One of the best 30 seconds ever captured on film is when Divine walks down a Baltimore high street in Pink Flamingos (1972). A 300 pound drag queen in leopard skin dress, high heels, eye makeup out of Star Trek and an attitude so flaming it was arson. The looks on the passersby are shock – genuine horror, captured by director John Waters on a cheap old camera filming out of a car window. This sordid movie about one transvestite’s quest to become “the filthiest woman alive” was trash, sure, but it was revolutionary trash. Art to make you barf. It ended, notoriously, in Divine eating dog feces on camera. Waters said that whenever audiences vomited when watching Pink Flamingos, it was like a standing ovation. And Divine earned one… Read More

The enemy is, by Western standards, psychotic (image from an Islamic State video).

I am anti-war and bombing rarely helps anyone – look at Libya. But the case for action in northern Iraq is an unusually strong one. When a shark swims towards a group of people stranded in the water, what do you do? You shoot the shark. Conservation be damned.

Of course, it’s war that got us in this situation in the first place. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was wrongheaded and unleashed a wave of ethnic violence of which this is only the latest part. Prior to the invasion, there were 1.5 million Christians in Iraq and today there are only 400,000. One might argue that this disastrous record is a good case against the West doing anything anywhere ever again…. Read More

I once shared a long flight to Washington DC with a Republican Party dealmaker: the kind of corn-fed, clean-cut guy who would regard Sarah Palin as “Left-of centre”. So I was astonished when I saw he had earphones in and was watching The Inbetweeners Movie. Astonished because he was laughing like a drain. When the 90 minutes were up, he said to me, “Brits are the best for comedy.” I returned to The Muppets and wondered what he might mean.

It turns out that Inbetweeners 2, the sequel, has broken all box-office records. For those who don’t know, it’s the everyday story of sordid folk – adolescents who are foul-mouthed, quite dim and utterly obsessed with sex. At face value, its appeal is mysterious in these politically correct times. The boys not only treat girls like meat, but objectify them like a puppy standing outside a butcher’s shop… Read More

Yahoo! Whizzer! Chips galore! Boris is going to run for Parliament in 2015! He announced it in a classically Boris way today: gallons of charm, self-effacing, a cheeky grin, a “golly-I-know-I-said-I-probably-wouldn’t-but…” and then – wahey! – the promise that he probably would! You could find Boris standing over a dead body with a smoking gun and he’d still be able to convince us that it was “nothing to do with me, old chap.” And so, with his return to national politics, after years spent in the wilderness of national TV, Boris brings hope for good humour and red-meat Tory policies. More on that in a paragraph.

Boris is taking quite a gamble. We all presume that once he’s back in Parliament it’ll take all of five minutes for him to become PM. In fact, he faces two grim prospects. One: Cameron wins in 2015 and Boris becomes side-lined… Read More

Salmond tried to win on gags; Darling won on facts (Photo: PA/Heathcliff O'Malley/Telegraph).

If any of the first gay marriages should turn into ugly divorces, this is what it’ll look like. Two middle-aged men shouting about what they said two years ago and demanding to know what'll happen to all the money. It was a rowdy debate – sometimes unflattering. But, boy, it was fun.

Alistair Darling won. He won in part because Salmond lost so carelessly. Salmond obviously thought he could laugh his way through the debate, throwing out a few gags here and there and occasionally reminding people that the English vote Tory (the monsters). The first tactic backfired when it became apparent that the audience was rather more interested in the future of their pensions than in Alex cracking wise about Darling’s patriotism. And… Read More

Recently, someone wrote the following on a 4chan internet forum: “Art used to be something to cherish. Now literally anything could be art. This post is art.” Someone else printed the words out, put them in a frame and floated them on eBay at a starting price of $500. Within 36 hours, the picture was sold for $90,900. Of course, it’s probably gone to a fake bidder with absolutely no intention of paying the money. In which case, perhaps the whole affair was itself a piece of performance art. That’s the trouble with conceptualism: you’re never quite sure when it ends. Someday, this blog post may well be regarded as a classic example of the art of Tim Stanley – from his early afternoon period, just before his eighth cup of tea of… Read More

Two cheers for Baroness Warsi: she might hold the wrong views, but she’s done the right thing about it. The senior minister has quit the Government over its stance towards Gaza, calling it inconsistent with the British tradition of law and order. One small quibble: the grammar in the third par is all over the place. It should be “neither … nor”, never “neither … and”. Sorry to be a pedant but it slightly takes the edge off a resignation letter if it’s handed back to you covered in red ink.

Grammar aside, this is an important moment in British politics. Warsi is the first high-level government minister to resign over foreign policy since Robin Cook and Clare Short in 2003. That means we’ve gone 11 years (11 years!) without someone protesting Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, the handling of Russia, the sale of arms overseas or even… Read More

What would a knight look like nowadays? Tall, handsome with a six pack you could strike a match on? No. He’d be gangly, awkward and addicted to nicotine. I know because I’ve seen Elliott Gould play him in The Long Goodbye (1973).

In the early Seventies, a couple of Hollywood producers bought the rights to Raymond Chandler’s classic novel The Long Goodbye and offered it to Robert Altman to direct. The producers wanted a classic tough guy to play private detective Philip Marlowe – Robert Mitchum and Clint Eastwood topped the list. Altman insisted on Elliott Gould, an actor so wild that the studio insisted he take a sanity test before he could have the part. It was a sign of where Altman wanted to take the project. Marlowe was a literary hero and a screen legend: the Irish-American private eye brought to life by golden age movie star… Read More

The bombing of the UN school should move the conscience of Westerners. (Photo: Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images)

If you are reading this and you feel very confused about what to think about Gaza, you are not alone. The US government is confused, too. Barack Obama has condemned the bombing of a United Nations school in Gaza that left at least 15 dead – sleeping children among them. Yet CNN also reports that the US has given Israel access to ammunition stockpiles. So the Americans condemn on the one hand and enable on the other.

Which is understandable. America cannot possibly condone what happened to the school, but it also cannot refuse Israeli requests for support, for to do so would abandon an ally that has legitimate claims to be defending itself against an onslaught of Hama… Read More

Will Mitt Romney please adopt me? The Romster has been blogging about a fantastic vacation he’s taken his grandchildren on across the southwest (go there before the barbarians cover it in cable cars) and it sounds much nicer than the holidays I took as a kid. “All totaled, we hiked over 50 miles,” he writes. “Quite a feat for the young — and for Ann and me.” Boy, I’d love to tag along with them. On a Segway, natch.

It sounds as though Romney has given up all thoughts of running again in 2016, as he keeps telling us. But is he right to throw away a third bid so easily? Critics may laugh at the thought of “Romney 2016: the Last Stand” and journalists may… Read More